A Troubled Neighborhood’s Revival in San Francisco

From left, Jack Gardner of the John Stewart Company; Daniel Solomon, a project architect; and Olson Lee of the Mayor’s Office of Housing, at new construction in Hunters View.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

March 18, 2014

Square Feet

By MORRIS NEWMAN

SAN FRANCISCO — Three residential towers in the notoriously crime-ridden, impoverished Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood opened earlier this year, the first signs of efforts to overhaul the area.

Not so long ago, the public housing project known as Hunters View that is being replaced by the new development was ranked worst in the nation in a 2007 survey by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

City housing officials are going so far as to re-brand the buildings as an $84 million effort to rehabilitate this southern tip of the city, where gang activity, violence and high unemployment have been intractable.

The goal, according to city housing officials, is to reinvent an isolated island of poverty into a “mixed-income” neighborhood with sophisticated architecture and a coherent urban design.

Plans for Hunters View call for the replacement of all 267 low-income units on site, plus 530 new market-rate rentals and condos. The developers are a venture of three private firms, the John Stewart Company, Devine & Gong and the Ridge Point Non-Profit Housing Corporation. The overall effort is overseen by the city. The total project, slated for completion in 2017, has an estimated cost of $500 million.

All the earlier buildings, a loose-knit group of wooden rowhouses, had been built in the 1950s on the foundations of World War II-era barracks for shipyard workers. Arranged haphazardly on different parts of a steep hillside, the rowhouses lacked any unified relationship to one another and as such were difficult to protect against crime. All the original buildings are to be demolished.

The new master plan, prepared by a local architect, Daniel Solomon, gives the area a regular street grid, as well as a new public park. Social services like child care and job training are available on the site of the new towers. The developers also have provided retail space for two or three stores, to offer residents better access to possible amenities like a convenience store.

And to try to improve access of residents from this isolated section to the rest of the city, the urban design includes new road connections between local streets and city thoroughfares.

Both the buildings and the master plan seek to emulate the San Francisco style of urban design, emphasizing both density and verticality, according to Mr. Solomon. He and a colleague, Anne Torney, also designed two of the new buildings. (Mr. Solomon and Ms. Torney, now partners at Mithun Solomon, designed the buildings while employed at WRT Solomon Etc. A third building was designed by Paulett Taggart Architects of San Francisco.

In an acknowledgment that the neighborhood is still quite unsafe, security measures have been included for prospective tenants: Residents have electronic key cards to open doors, while the window glass is bulletproof.

The Bayview Hunters Point public housing site “typifies all the challenges of trying to create an economically integrated neighborhood,” according to Olson Lee, director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and head of the HOPE SF program, a city public housing renewal program.

A majority of the residents are young, poorly educated and unemployed. At least half of the project’s 700 residents are under the age of 18, according to the city’s Housing Authority. Murder and drug use rates are among the highest in the city, according to figures cited by the San Francisco district attorney’s office.

The mix of social ills in one place is “a recipe for disaster,” conceded Jack D. Gardner, chief executive of John Stewart.

Dilapidated housing conditions worsened the problems. “The facilities were old and there were no funds to maintain them,” Mr. Lee said. The seemingly random placement of the old buildings on different terraces of a steep hillside turned the area into a “no man’s land,” in terms of security, according to Mr. Lee.

The construction of Hunters View has taken more than 10 years, starting with three successive applications by the city to the federal HOPE VI program before 2003, all of which were rejected. Administered by HUD, the HOPE VI program was well received by city planners and public officials because of its strategy for converting public housing developments, restricted to low-income renters, into mixed-income communities that included for-sale units.

One goal of HOPE VI was to provide stability to the communities through homeownership. (By itself, San Francisco has been the beneficiary of five HOPE VI projects.) Despite its acclaim, however, Congress halted funding for the program in 2010, Mr. Lee said.

In 2006, San Francisco undertook to rebuild the derelict neighborhood on its own, under a city program called HOPE SF, in homage to the mothballed federal program.

Mr. Lee said the city’s plans went one step farther by not requiring residents to leave the area during construction.

“The problem is, when people leave the neighborhood, not many return when the new project is finished,” Mr. Lee said.

By contrast, local residents stay in their existing apartments until a new unit is available, and then move in directly. One such resident is Isaac Latchison, a 46-year-old maintenance worker employed by the John StewartCompany, who recently moved into a new apartment.

“It’s perfect,” said the longtime resident, who said he had lived “most of my life, off and on” in the neighborhood. “I have space for all my belongings, and it has a view,” he said of the new unit, which offers vistas of the bay and the city skyline in the distance.

Mr. Gardner, the home builder, said he was pleased to keep low-income housing in the area at a time when the southernmost strip of San Francisco appeared ripe for gentrification. “I’m glad we were able to carve out an island of affordability,” he said.